shm cds? as their being any scientific investigation in to this format over normal cd quality?

Depends on the title. Some are some aren't.

Hello

Yes i`m aware of the  master issue some being better e.t.c. what i was asking is,had their being any in depth research on the subject

best wishes Steve

Steve

Who needs scientific research?

just buy one of a title you know well and try it on any cd player.

if you can hear an improvement (or not), who needs the scientific explanation to prove what you are possibly hearing.

cheers

Aleg

Hello

Really good to hear from you.I take your point but you would have thought in todays world that it should be possible to give a general opinion as to the value or not of shm cds?

I was just asking if any such research as being carried out,and of course if they were to prove Generaly higher quality than normal cds then I would go for the unitilite over the unitiqute2 thats what its about for me.not only that our old cd player will be a poor gauge to base an opinion on.

all the best Steve

Using a process developed by JVC and Universal Music Japan discovered through the joint companies' research into LCD display manufacturing SHM-CDs feature improved transparency on the data side of the disc allowing for more accurate reading of CD data by the CD player laser head. SHM-CD format CDs are fully compatible with standard CD players.

Thats a company statement and not mine.

this post was in another thread. It's a very interesting interview with Barry Daiment. well worth the read and I spent an interesting evening following all available links.

the pertinent bit is

(this is a q&a)

On your Soundkeeper Recordings site, you recommend CD-Rs over CDs for those buyers who will play back their music on a transport or player yet you also recommend the CD for those buyers that intend to rip their music to hard drive. Could you explain why a CD-R is better than a CD when spinning a disc and why this difference doesn't matter when ripping and playing back from hard drive?

I wish I could explain why. I’ve read a number of theories and some of them may or may not make sense.

From my earliest days in CD mastering, I always noticed that the finished CDs from different replication facilities all sound different from each other and none sounds indistinguishable from the CD master used to make it. Often, CDs made on different production lines within the same plant don’t sound like each other either. In all cases, there is a loss of “focus” and fine detail, usually subtle, sometimes not so subtle.

When it came time to choose a plant to do Soundkeeper’s CDs, I spoke with a few dozen facilities. The one I ultimately chose was the only one which, without any prompting from me, did not claim their CDs sound exactly like the masters. It turns out, their CDs are the closest in my experience. I can still distinguish between the CD and the master from which it was made but with their discs, I need a synchronized playback against the master to discern the differences.

This plant cuts the glass master (the first step in CD production) in real time, instead of the more typical 4x or faster used by most other facilities nowadays. They also use a ~9 second injection molding cycle, rather than the more common ~4 second cycle. Whether these account for why their discs are more faithful, I don’t know. Some say procedures like this make for better formed “pits” in the disc, making it easier for the player to read the disc with less “jitter” (i.e., timing errors). I don’t know if this is the case but I do know I like the results.

With a well made CD-R (burned at relatively slow speed on a high quality blank), I find the results of playback in a CD transport or player sound closer to the CD master than even the best pressings in my experience.

I think something similar occurs with processes such as SHM, Blu-Spec and HQCD, where the processes are different from usual and sometimes the materials in the disc itself are different. I recently compared some of these with their plain CD counterparts. I was pretty surprised by the degree of difference I heard and found it to be so obvious, I would have bet I was listening to two different masterings, with different EQ!

To “prove” this, I extracted both the “special” disc and the plain CD to computer hard drive so I could perform a “null” test. In a null test, two digital files are synchronized (to the sample) and mixed together. The polarity of one of the files is reversed. What results is that everything the two files have in common, i.e., what is the same in the files, is cancelled (or “nulled&rdquo, leaving only what is different between the files. To my surprise, the result of the null test was dead silence. Listening to the two files from the computer resulted in both sounding indistinguishable from each other. It was a slightly clearer version of the “better” disc heard from the CD player. Whether commercial CD, “special” material or process CD or a fine CD-R, my experience has consistently been that extraction to computer and playback from there (as a raw PCM file in .aif or .wav format) gets me the true sound of the master.

SJB

There are/were a couple of SHM sampler double CDs produced CD1 was SHM-CD the other ordinary Red Book.

Interesting that that has re-surfaced from the past...some of the effect may have to do with (reduced) laser current.  On the other hand, ripping and re-burning might (in the worst of cases) might provide better pit structure |_| not \_/ and less media jitter.  Clearly, there is even less media jitter with ripped media on a fixed disc!